Its intentions are simple: collate the major available reference material and dish up anew in a format that surveys the surveys, as it were. So not only is this useful in getting a scatter of books, articles, and reviews all together, but the reshuffling becomes in its own right a comment. An outsider’s comment, for Professor Herbert C. Jaffa is from New York University and has not been in this country since World War II. His earlier volume on Kenneth Slessor (Twains) was the first substantial overseas survey of a major Australian poet. He does not enter into the field without some significant prior know ledge. Part of the freshness of his new volume, though, does derive from what we may call the logical deductions Professor Jaffa has made out of a large and sometimes conflicting assembly of source material. If it is claimed that a lot of the ‘real’ things in contemporary Australian poetry are thus distorted, then we should ask ourselves why this is so.

The paucity of material on poets below the age of about sixty is an immediate element highlighted by this survey. Professor Jaffa has to rely on one of two anthologies and the brilliant Southerly articles by James Tulip and that’s about it. Perhaps Les Murray and Bruce Dawe, those middle-aged ‘young’ poets, have attracted a small cluster of articles (rather than reviews), but the field is surely much wider and, dare I say it, more interesting than that. Both Michael Dransfield and Charles Buckmaster have been dead most of the decade, yet, despite a certain cult following, there is not even one half-serious attempt to examine their contribution. Poor Charles Buckmaster has not even had his work salvaged into a posthumous ‘Collected Poems’. Pity the poor worker, then, in his Washington Square Study, attempting to thread the pieces together into something like a viable perspective.

Professor Jaffa, indeed, does precisely that, and with considerable tact and some wit. His volume is divided into five sections of which the last is by far the most extended and, in its own right, intelligent and perceptive. The first four sections deal with ‘Bibliographical aids and reference material’, ‘Major books, surveys, criticism and histories’, ‘Major anthologies’, and ‘Major articles’. Section five surveys individual poets, and begins with Slessor, FitzGerald, Hope, Stewart, Wright, and McAuley. The next subsection covers ‘Important and established poets’ ranging from John Blight and W. Hart-Smith down to Murray and Lehmann. The rest of the volume covers movements: the Jindyworobaks, the Angry Penguins, the Expatriates, then ‘Other poets’ (including ‘Other “Other” Poets’) and finally a section on younger writers which incorporates sixteen biographical notes.

Herbert C. Jaffa quietly and persuasively leads us into and through this wealth of material, and his modest approach to the interpretation and selection becomes an object lesson in cool balance and presentation. One of the immediate advantages of a scholarly and disinterested, but sympathetic, approach is the way movements, coteries, and claims can be aired and given the value of their intent as well as of their effect. and Professor Jaffa has been remarkably acute in most of his appraisals.

I said earlier that this was an eminently browsable volume. Let me end with just one quotation, which in itself gives a pretty good indication of how the volume comes into focus. Recently, when I was writer in residence in Perth, a student complained to me that for an assignment on Vivian Smith she could find no background material at all. Professor Jaffa’s volume immediately locates the move from there: The Vivian Smith article begins with a brief biography, list of publications, quotes in full a major article on An Island South from Southerley (nearly two pages), then has a section headed ‘Other References’ which says:

When Smith, at 23, published his first book. The Other Meaning (1956), two older more established poets, David Campbell and Ray Mathew, responded in a set of complementing impressions, ‘Double Exposure’ in Southerly XVII. Campbell, writing first, opined that ‘the other meaning’ that Smith was searching for in his poems was ‘a view of life that includes and transcends pain’. The search, however, was not only for ‘the tune outside of pity’ but also for ‘the technical means to convey it’. On the latter subject Campbell saw Smith as having a fine understanding of ‘the shape and color of words’ and though in some of his poems they were ‘scattered like the wreckage on the foreshore’, in others, they ‘came together with finality’, like fine miniatures having ‘something of the compassion and tragic charm of Picasso’s early circus paintings’.

Mathew cites Dylan Thomas’ recollection that in his early poetry ‘two sides of an unresolved argument came out of a person who came willynilly out of one particular atmosphere and environment’. Mathew said it was just that which Smith gave the reader: ‘The poetry is where he is, and a great deal of what he is. It is not written in English, but in Australian, like the most convincing Australian poetry, to date; it is written in English and is Tasmanian, which is new, and which gives it exoticism.’

And its island world of winter and water is ‘a new country in Australian poetry’, a stage where ‘Smith’s vision of life can struggle towards a world that is not merely alive with pain, and without its other meaning’.

An art of selection, yes, but there has been a lot of care and craft – and interest – gone into the making. Perhaps, after all, there has been nobody, even in the spawn of the universities, here with just that flair as well as care. The job achieved, we can cry ‘but of course’. Already I find I am using it and referring to it constantly.